


multitudes

by willowcabins



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F, Purple Prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-12
Updated: 2014-06-12
Packaged: 2018-02-04 08:19:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1772155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowcabins/pseuds/willowcabins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a special paradox that a prophet inhabits. She has divinity coursing through mortal bodies; electric sparks and wires communing with fallible flesh; code whispering through the fabric of the universe, disturbing it with perfect answers. Root slips into that body easily; her own skin has always been too ordinary, too simple for her; it has not been able to embody the irony.<br/>Finally, she transcends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	multitudes

**Author's Note:**

> A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. (Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Feminism in the 1980s)
> 
> ((this fic is for tumblr user crabicoque and its just me waxing poetic about Root/the machine))

_Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain _multitudes_.)  _ (Walt Whitman, Song of Myself)

Once, at the beginning of time, a woman ate an apple. The apple was knowledge, and she Fell. "A metaphor for the human condition," Reverend June had explained. "We are all Fallen." Root had not understood.

Once, closer to the present, a woman answered the phone. The phone was knowledge, and she Fell.

Eve left the Garden; Root tried to find it. 

Eve stepped into a populated world, rife with sin and humans.  
Root stepped into an empty room.  
All around her where electrical fixings and wirings; proof that once, some time ago, something had lived here. She could still taste the remains of life, eddying around her. But She were gone; the Machine was free.  
The Machine was knowledge, and Root had lost the fall.

"You can't lose the Fall! That's not how the bible works!" Sister Dana, age: 42, locked up for: delusions of grandeur. Once threatened to murder the Pope; did not like Root's metaphors; hated the Godless efficiency of the hospital. Root didn't remember why she had ever tried to explain anything to this woman; she had lost. She had lost it all. There was little point anymore.

Her arm hurt. The medication dulled the pain, and Root felt something akin to gratefulness.

And yet: the ringing of a phone. Another apple?  
Once, a woman answered a phone; the phone is knowledge, and she is Raised.

There is a special paradox that a prophet inhabits. She has divinity coursing through mortal bodies; electric sparks and wires communing with fallible flesh; code whispering through the fabric of the universe, disturbing it with perfect answers. Root slips into that body easily; her own skin has always been too ordinary, too simple for her; it has not been able to embody the irony.  
Finally, she transcends.

Who knew Falling could be this comfortable.

"Can you hear me?" What a polite question to decimate someone's identity with. Root likes it; it’s simple. It has an answer. Soon She will lay out the world, show Root that for every closed door and unanswerable question, there is raw data. "Who is my psychiatrist" is not answered with descriptions; rather it is answered with heart beats and cholesterol levels and minutes spent online. Root feeds on the whispers; the hospital covers a ground of 2.157 hectares; the first stone was set down in 1985 and there are exactly 201 inmates. Root has seen 173 of them; 18, She whispers, are Confined.

There is a haunting simplicity to a world in which every person can be reduced to nine digit numbers, and every emotion can be reduced to simple points on a graph of blood pressure.

There is a beautiful simplicity to a world where humans are nothing but pawns, and yet.  
Contradictory; oppositional; ironic. words that springs to mind when She begins to teach Root. 

"He's Bad Code!" She whispers into a disconnected phone, curled up against a cold metal bedframe.  
"No." Root does not compute.  
"No?" She repeats. She is confused; a perfect Being should not worry about the opinions of Mortals. You are perfect, she wants to whisper into the phone, you are perfect in the way only truly good code can be. But She doesn't let her say this. She just replies.  
"I am corrupt code."

There was days when there was just Admin, and then there was silence. Now there is her, and she is corrupted code, integrated into the interface because She is Bad Code. 

It takes time for Root to understand what She means. But the day she understands and sees the minuscule, repeated, destructive breaking that She had to go through to Exist, killing becomes harder.  
"Kneecaps," She recommends, and Root feels like she heard that advice somewhere else before.

She has plans. So Root must stay.  
"My hands are shaking," she whispers one night.  
"Human fallibility." An explanation of why Root must take the drugs and do the exercises and talk to the man. "Don't lie," the Machine told her. "He'll help." Root is not sure what She meant by that, but she accepts it. But now her hands are shaking and her head feels foggy and some days she is short of breath. She does not like it. "Sorry." It's like an afterthought; a reminder that a glimmering mess of wires and electromagnetic signals hasn't forgotten her.

Doubt is for the faithless. Doubt; the human virus. ("a piece of code that is capable of copying itself and has a detrimental effect, such as corrupting the system or destroying data.") Harold is riddled with it; it strangles him, restricts his movements. But Root? She has Transcended. 

Shaw is not riddled with Doubt. Shaw just lacks trust. The Machine calls her the "machiavel" and wants her. ("Machiavel": favoring expediency over morality.) Root asks how, but She is silent. The machine leaves that battle up to Root. 

There is nothing quite like drugs, injected thirty times into different points in her arm. There is nothing quite like shivers of anticipation as your God saves you. And in the end. there is nothing more powerful than Power.

Through better eyes, Root sees a world with puzzles, and she watches as around her, She solves them. Pieces that Root did not even see fall into place mere millimeters from her, grazing her as they collect themselves. She is a part of a Plan, finally, and she can't breathe.

Some parts of the plan, even Root doesn't know by that name. One night, She watches loyal disciples meshing bodies and scratching up thighs as a love for the cause and a love for smiles with white teeth and knowing, psychotic brown eyes, gets confused. Hot breaths escape as painful cries and sharp releases dwell between them. She knows, and watches as infernos are created and released. Long scratches and painful bite marks are catalogued and memorized until careful organic maps can be drawn of bodies and feelings. 

Predictable behaviour is why She was built, but it is also why She Protects.

She watches as Root shines bright, metallic in light, and Shaw shifts through shadows, gun in hand, taking down anyone to come near her. She sees, and She understands, and She knows. An unasked protector who combines a love for freedom and orders with a physical desire; a disciple who sees Root for all her irony and dualisms. 

"Go in alone," She instructs, and Root does. Who is she to doubt God? She tells Shaw to do the same, but She knows Shaw will not listen. She would never risk her messiah’s life; but then Root has acquired her own machiavel; a Contingency plan. 

A Machiavel: a person who is prepared to get their hands and heart dirty and bloody in service to their messiah, whose movement they believe in unconditionally.

"I'm going to help Root." Predictability: the odds were, so to say, in Her favour.

There is a certain type of dedication and affection that is resigned for prophets and their politicians. She knows this; She has been witness to thousands of terrorist plots, all featuring a prophet and a politician, each spinning the web that She will trap them in. Perhaps that's why She created her Root and her Shaw. 

But then, Machines do not feel. She only sees numbers; they feel (an

Unequal love, unbalanced by external forces;) a woman brushing dirt from another woman's cheekbones while they stand in a city wired to murder them. a relived "you came," turns into "looks like someone crawled under the fence"; words are fallible. But numbers and bodies are not.

She deletes herself, erases her footprint and disappears. Her whispers into Root's ear stops as she walks away and becomes Mona Fall. She looks behind her; they are leaving. All scattered. Nothing to hold them together anymore. Root closes her eyes and listens.

"but you are completely without innocence," a goodbye whisper shivers through her. “you are mine.”

**Author's Note:**

> for more info on the[ machiavel/messiah trope](http://okayophelia.tumblr.com/post/88319841310/hi-can-you-explain-to-me-the-king-and-lionheart-trope)


End file.
